This paper reviews the current developments in the use of nQuire (www.nquire.org.uk), an Open University platform supporting engagement of members of the public in large-scale interactive surveys and science investigations. The platform is designed to continue a series of mass online science investigations from BBC Lab UK linked to broadcast TV and radio programmes, alongside the citizen-led inquiries. This paper reports on progress with the development of the platform and its use in a variety of contexts

This paper addresses the related issues of which pedagogies improve with scale and how to develop a novel platform for inquiry-led learning at scale. The paper begins by introducing pedagogy-informed design of platforms for learning at scale. It then summarizes previous work to develop a platform for open science investigations. Then, it introduces a new platform for inquiry-led learning at scale. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the effectiveness of the platform to: meet its design requirements; enable individuals, groups and institutions to design inquiry-led investigations; engage members of the public to participate; and enable learning activities on the platform to sustain and grow.

A series of reports on Innovating Pedagogy were launched in 2012 to look at the trends that show how practitioners may engage in innovation in pedagogy. This paper looks at the latest set of trends, and highlights four 2015 trends that seem particularly rich for researchers to explore in the next five years.

The ‘blockchain’ is the core mechanism for the Bitcoin digital payment system. It embraces a set of inter-related technologies: the blockchain itself as a distributed record of digital events, the distributed consensus method to agree whether a new block is legitimate, automated smart contracts, and the data structure associated with each block. We propose a permanent distributed record of intellectual effort and associated reputational reward, based on the blockchain that instantiates and democratises educational reputation beyond the academic community. We are undertaking initial trials of a private blockchain or storing educational records, drawing also on our previous research into reputation management for educational systems.

For the past four years The Open University has published annual Innovating Pedagogy reports. Our aim has been to shift the focus of horizon scanning for education away from novel technologies towards new forms of teaching, learning and assessment for an interactive world, to guide teachers and policy makers in productive innovation. In the most recent report, from over thirty pedagogies, ranging from bricolage to stealth assessment, we have identified six overarching themes, of scale, connectivity, reflection, extension, embodiment, and personalisation [8]. Delivering education at massive scale has been the headline innovation of the past four years. This success begs the question of "which pedagogies can work successfully at scale?".

Citizen inquiry is an innovative informal science learning approach, which engages members of the general public in scientific investigations sparked by their personal experience of everyday science, and to which other members can contribute. This paper aims to describe the network of interactions and contributions of Weather-it, an online Citizen Inquiry community accommodated by the nQuire-it platform, which involves people in creating and maintaining their own weather missions (investigations). The interaction patterns within Weather-it are mainly explored through social network analysis of community members and missions. The results indicate the quiet and active members within the community, their splitting into sub-communities, and their contribution and data collection methods and preferences. These results provide insight into the behaviour of people in such public engagement projects.

Self-Directed Learning (SDL) is gaining interest, as online learning is increasingly learner-centered. FutureLearn courses provide an array of online interactions and content deliveries, which have allowed the authors to investigate a diversity of SDL elements. This preliminary research examines the SDL taking place in three FutureLearn courses, and categorises those learner actions into meaningful elements and dimensions for the learners. The SDL framework by Bouchard [ 1 ] is used to interpret the self-reported findings coming from active learners. The research uses a grounded theory approach to look for learner experiences related to four dimensions (algorithmic, conative, semiotic, and economic) of the Bouchard [ 1 ] framework, and to discover new dimensions. Various research instruments are used: online surveys, learning logs, and one-on-one interviews, all collected pre-, during, or post-course. The initial adaptation of Bouchard’s framework offers insights into SDL, its meaning, and value as perceived by the learners.

Software applications to share and remediate video have become ubiquitous and interacting with video has developed into a mainstream cultural activity in many societies. Like other media video has benefits and limitations for learning. We describe in this paper Video Pathways, a social Video Environment for learning through creation of multi-path online video. Our research assesses whether creation of video narratives multi-path representations, based on ubiquitous video from popular video hosting sites, is an effective way to represent knowledge. Initial formative evaluation with Video Pathways has revealed good usability and desirability and shown the creative potential of Video Pathways.

One-to-one technology involves equipping each child with a computing device that provides personalized learning tools. While one-to-one learning is showing promise in classrooms, it has revealed problems, including management of the technology-enabled classroom, lack of support for collaborative and whole class working, the design of lessons that switch easily between activities, and difficulty in re-use of lesson components. In this paper we describe the SceDer system to orchestrate learning with one-to-one technologies. It provides an authoring system for teachers to design lessons, an interchange language to describe lesson sequences and resources, and a delivery system that enables the teacher to manage collaborative one-to-one learning in the classroom. The system has been tested in school classrooms and the results show that it is effective in managing a fluid movement between individual, group, and whole class learning activities.

We describe a study that investigates the use of a multimodal technology in a learning task. In relation to the recent interest in learning as a multimodal experience, the use of a technology to acquire and visualize data while in a learning task in real time is argued to be beneficial and enjoyable for pupils. A study is described which investigates whether using the learner's own movements or viewing someone else's movements produces different outcomes when learning about kinematics graphs.

A phenomenological study of personal experiential learning was conducted. This informed a descriptive Framework of Lifelong Learning (FoLL) which describes four facets of lifelong learning: the learner, the organisation of learning, the process for carrying out learning projects, and the breakdowns that occur during, or because of, learning. The FoLL was then used to derive a set of general requirements for a lifelong learning support system. System design has commenced based on these requirements. The paper discusses the FoLL and presents the system's general requirements.

MEXICA is a computer model that produces frameworks for short stories based on the engagement-reflection cognitive account of writing. During engagement MEXICA generates material guided by content and rhetorical constraints, avoiding the use of explicit goals or story-structure information. During reflection the system breaks impasses, evaluates the novelty and interestingness of the story in progress and verifies that coherence requirements are satisfied. In this way, MEXICA complements and extends those models of computerised story-telling based on traditional problem-solving techniques where explicit goals drive the generation of stories. This paper describes the engagement-reflection account of writing, the general characteristics of MEXICA and reports an evaluation of the program.

There have been few naturalistic studies of synchronous computer-mediated communication. For two years a telewriting system was used for tutoring students at the UK Open University, connecting up to ten study centres and adding graphic communication to voice-only teleconferencing. This paper presents the findings of a study of the operation of the system, concentrating on breakdowns in communication and the technical and organisational changes needed to overcome them. The paper concludes with recommendations for the design of future telewriting systems and guidelines for the deployment of computer-mediated communication systems as part of working life.